Economists:Entrepreneurs::Blind Men:Interior Decorators

As part of my continuing series of Analogies that Should Be on the SAT, this is what Famous Entrepreneurs do (h/t Brad DeLong): In the IBM PC era, Steve drove innovation forward with the Macintosh. This, like the Apple II, was squarely aimed at expanding the use of PCs to everyone, the "computer for the rest of us." Everyone now knows that this was innovating too fast, and that cheaper, duller IBM machines running Microsoft's dull clone of an earlier operating system would become the standard. But do you know how Steve changed when he realized that "the rest of us" were not going to buy the Mac? He learned that the most important early customers for Macs were corporate marketing departments (those graphics!) and worked hard to create, as he told me not long after, "the best computer company for those corporate marketers we can." This is what Nobel Prize-winning economists do (h/t Noah): As Thomas J. Sargent, one of the leading proponents of the Rational Expectations Hypothesis recounted, "after about five years of doing [standard statistical tests] on rational expectations models, I recall Bob Lucas and Ed Prescott both telling me that those tests were rejecting too many good models. Real entrepreneurs don't wallow in vision, they sell product. "Real" economists, otoh...